David Michael Miller
The big question hovering over the state Democratic Party convention in Middleton this weekend is, who will be the next party chair?
The big question I have is, who cares?
You could make a case that incumbent chair Martha Laning should have fallen on her sword after the November elections. Hillary Clinton became the first presidential candidate to lose Wisconsin since Walter Mondale. Russ Feingold lost a race everyone (including me) thought he could not possibly lose. What seemed like a decent chance to pick up a congressional seat in northeast Wisconsin failed. In a year when the Dems looked to have a chance to pick up at least a seat or two in the state Legislature, they actually lost a couple.
And, probably most egregiously, the party failed to so much as field a candidate against state Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler this spring.
But in Laning’s defense, it’s not clear that anything she could have done would have made a difference. Clinton and Feingold ran their own campaigns and are responsible for their own defeats. The same pretty much goes for the race in the 8th Congressional District where the Republicans fielded a very strong candidate in Mike Gallagher. And the state legislative seats got pulled along in the undertow that spelled doom to Clinton and Feingold. Arguably, if the top of the ticket had been stronger, the results down ticket would have been better.
There’s really no excuse for not coming up with a warm body with a law degree to take on Ziegler. Sure, she had lots of money, but the Democrats had a fired-up base and this would have been the first chance to lash out against Donald Trump and all that happened in the fall. Add to that the fact that the vote would have happened just as Neil Gorsuch was being installed in the U.S. Supreme Court seat that should have gone to Merrick Garland and you had all the makings for a liberal win.
So, I suppose the Democrats could replace Laning on the strength of the Ziegler failure alone, but the truth is that the party structure, such as it is, just doesn’t really matter all that much. Democrats aren’t losing elections because of the technicalities of voter targeting, door-knocking walk lists or the like. They could do better at candidate recruitment, but their fundamental problem is that they are fumbling their message. The party’s brand is a mess.
For too many Wisconsinites the Democratic Party stands for a collection of interest groups, each of which is demanding something of society. On the 100th anniversary of John Kennedy’s birth, my party asks not what we can do for our country, but what our country has done to us and how we must be compensated.
Identity politics — whether it’s white, evangelical identity politics on the right or gay, black, Hispanic or gender identity politics on the left — is the very root of the problem. We’ve stopped thinking of ourselves as Americans or Wisconsinites and started thinking of ourselves as members of a tribe assigned by gender, skin color, or sexual orientation.
What I yearn for isn’t a new state party chair, but a party that has a message about inclusion that is truly inclusive. What it has now is a message that essentially blames straight, white guys for everything. And it pays the price at the polls for that. Mary Burke lost white men by 25 points when she ran against Scott Walker in 2014. Had she just lost them by 11 points, she would have won the election. As a party, you just can’t alienate a demographic group that large (white guys make up 44 percent of the vote in Wisconsin) and expect to win many elections.
So do I want a party that tries to appeal to white men? No. I would like a party with a message that transcends all identity politics and that tries to forge a new national and state identity around a common set of values and goals. I know it’s absolute heresy right now, but I think maybe we should turn up the flame on the Sterno under the old melting pot just a little. Deemphasize our personal identities, stop looking so very hard for ways in which we are being wronged, refrain from celebrating our victimhood, and instead define a positive common goal for our state and our nation.
That’s not really so crazy because it’s essentially what Barack Obama did in 2008. He ran on hope and he allowed people to define their hope in any way that meant something for them. It was a brilliant way of melding distinct group goals into one overarching concept. Had the Republicans not set out to thwart and defeat him at all costs, there might actually have been a post-partisan politics.
So, my fellow Democrats, ask not who the next state party chair will be, but what we can do to bring the state together.
